Deployment of substantial numbers of RF devices with associated controllers and/or sensors and networking thereof presents increasing challenges for set-up and management of the system elements and network communication elements of a wireless communication system. In at least some applications, system commissioning may involve accurate determination of locations of installed RF devices.
For an RF location determination service, for example, it is desirable for the system to know the location of RF devices, such as RF beacons, so that each RF device can provide its location in an RF signal or an identification of the device in the RF signal for location lookup, to enable estimation of location of a mobile device that receives the signal. The location of each RF device in a venue is determined as a part of the commissioning operation that is typically performed soon after the RF device is installed. Depending on the number of RF devices and the size and configuration of the venue, the commissioning operation may be time consuming.
There have been recent proposals to deploy intelligent luminaires that include RF devices, such as a Bluetooth® or other wireless transceiver in each intelligent luminaire. The intelligent luminaire may include the wireless communication capability to provide an RF positioning service. Commissioning of such a Bluetooth-enabled luminaire often has involved a localized communication process between each RF (e.g. Bluetooth) enabled luminaire and an RF enabled user terminal in which each fixture is manually configured to be associated with a relative position with respect to other RF enabled luminaires in the vicinity. However, this commissioning process is costly, time consuming, and is not guaranteed to be accurate because of the human interaction required for its execution.